Witness - Davis Vanguard

Publisher: David Greenwald | Managing Editor: Benjamin Frandsen

Production Manager: Shriya Chittapuram | Public Relations: Elisa Plata

Democratizing free speech by centering the anonymized and uncensored testimony of justice-impacted citizen witnesses of the carceral state, enabling the autonomous stakeholder curation of an accurate historical record of mass incarceration.

The incarcerated content creators and carceral literacy activists Ghostwrite Mike and The Mundo Press, the co-creators of the trauma-informed Barz Behind Bars (B3) Creative Writing Spoken Word Performing Arts Workshop @barzbehindbars_ deployed at eleven adult prisons in California, are each recipients of the 2024 Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild Fellowship. As VCJG fellows, Ghost and Mundo jointly produce from confinement the carceral news column Witness for the Los Angeles Vanguard’s Social Justice Bureau housed at UCLA, and are the producers of Inner Views, a virtual interview format that engages with artists, authors, academics, historians, and thought leaders to examine the intersection of the arts, culture, media, academia, politics, generational trauma, and the exercise of state power through the lens of equity and justice in order to deliver stimulating and uncensored conversations to the nation’s carceral state residents for their digital consumption via handheld tablet devices. Check out our collaboration announcement here.

The Mundo Press is the Carceral Mentor Coordinator for the nonprofit Ben Free Project. Read and follow his work h ere. You can reach him at mundo@benfreeproject.org.

Ghostwrite Mike is the Carceral Program Developer for the nonprofit Ben Free Project, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit Radical Reversal. Read and follow his work here. Listen to his appearance on the Everyday Injustice podcast here. You can reach him at witness@davisvanguard.org.

Check out the BarzOnline blog.

Witness | VCJG Staff writers

The Mundo Press | Ghostwrite Mike

The VCJG ascribes to and abides by the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) Code of Ethics (SPJ.org) in its practice to SEEK TRUTH AND REPORT IT, MINIMIZE HARM, ACT INDEPENDENTLY, and BE ACCOUNTABLE AND TRANSPARENT in the pursuit of responsible news making.

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” – George Orwell.

Radical Verses is an IPIPS | VCJG carceral poetry creative arts project that partners with Barz Behind Bars | Ben Free Project to honor the life of Angela Davis and the abolitionist work of Critical Resistance by braiding rare photos of one of humanity’s most iconic justice warriors with the revolutionary prose of carceral state residents and justice-impacted artists recorded live to form a visual coffee table book, audio book, spoken word music composition, and documentary film properties curated for digital consumption by the more than 700k folks living in confinement within the United States with access to a digital tablet device. (Photos courtesy of: Papers of Angela Y. Davis, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University; Concept/Digital design: Ghostwrite Mike & Kamakazi Mergatroyd for Barz Behind Bars | Ben Free Project)

To those who stand for the democratization of free speech, speak in support of our right to engage in civil discourse, and leverage their platforms in service of carceral journalism, we salute you. #VCJG

Projects

The WITNESS | Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild (VCJG) comprises justice-impacted professional journalists reporting from confinement while residing in prisons throughout the U.S. These stakeholder contributors witness, experience, investigate, opine, and report ethically on the impacts of the carceral state by filing their public-facing stories on the Vanguard’s digital news platform—using their respective Byline monikers—which are collated for consumption at https://davisvanguard.org/witness/.

Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild | Society of Fellows (SOF) is a VCJG Fellowship program that awards financial support to confined newsmakers to fund the expense of filing their news copy via text message app using DOC-issued tablet devices—pairs them with a writing mentor—and funds the hiring of dedicated free world production staff working to receive, upload, and publish their work directly into the Vanguard’s Witness digital news ecosystem.

Everyday Injustice | Inner Views (EIIV) is an insurgent audio podcast production collaboration between Everyday Injustice host David Greenwald, and the VCJG Society of Fellows presenting curated guest segments featuring residents of the carceral state via phone, and free world guests via Zoom, coordinated from confinement—without the use of a studio, audio technology tools, or prison facility Media Center—as a real-world news making proof of concept exemplar for piloting and normalizing responsible audio programming, curated from prison, and distributed digitally to more than 700,000 confined residents of the carceral state for their free/on-demand consumption via DOC-issued tablet devices throughout the U.S.

Inner Views | davisvanguard.org/2024/11/everyday-injustice-episode-261-conversation-with-youth-serving-lwop/

VCJG | Inner Views Lecture Series (IVLS) is a first of its kind on-camera, long-form, docu-style virtual interview series collaboration featuring artists, authors, journalists, educators, scholars, thought leaders, and activists who examine the intersection of the arts, culture, media, academia, politics, generational trauma, crime, education, and desistance, with the exercise of state power, through the lens of equity and justice—edited in collaboration with volunteer CSU Stanislaus media students—and distributed digitally to more than 700,000 confined residents of the carceral state for their free/on-demand consumption via DOC-issued tablet devices throughout the U.S. Three of the nation’s premier authors, educators, and carceral studies scholars—Elizabeth Hinton (Yale University/Yale Law School), Keramet Reiter (UC Irvine School of Law), and Heather Ann Thompson (University of Michigan)—will debut this project for carceral state audiences in 2025.

IPIPS Inside Knowledge | Carceral Studies Archive (CSA) is a collaborative digital humanities archival partnership between the VCJG and the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety (IPIPS) at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University that ensures stakeholder journalistic contributions to—and the preservation of—the historical record of the carceral state for engagement by scholars, practitioners, and the public. Via the CSA, IPIPS will house curations of testimonies, manuscripts, and multi-format creatives that document the toll of incarceration on residents of the carceral state, including: Witness | VCJG | EEIV | IVLS | CFS.

IPIPS Inside Knowledge | Carceral Forensics Society (CFS) is a national prison-based collegiate debate community that organizes, stages, records, and archives virtual, non-public, non-streamed carceral community debate events conducted via Zoom, converted to audio, and transcribed, using the British Parliamentary format, and employing a three-tiered “weight class” system of competition, whereby students having earned between zero and sixty college units (AA degree-seeking/Tier One), 61-120 college units (BA degree-seeking/Tier Two), and 121 or more college units (MA degree-seeking/Tier Three), compete in teams comprised of comparably experienced learners, such that CFS events consist of three different team challenges within each engagement.

The carceral community of collegiate learners residing in confinement throughout the nation who aim to cultivate their literacy-based skillset—critical reading, research, argument formation, and persuasive oratory—which forensics necessarily exercises, need not pursue the willingness of a prestigious Ivy League institution to travel a team into their prison (Harvard versus MCI-Norfolk), in order to convince the respective Warden/DOC to approve a debate, any more than there need be a willing free-world college challenger in order to convene a prison debate, or only one team to represent that student community. The normalization progressive DOCs tout as being critical to desistance, requires that confined student bodies acquire the necessary agency to participate in pedagogically sound civic engagement functions that build positive community bonds, foster collaboration, and affirm the hallmark elements of the academic experience most carceral state residents will encounter in the normative course of campus life.

The customary use of Zoom, video call, and tele-med technology by DOCs throughout the country—facilitating medical encounters, legal counsel consultations, administrative appeal interviews, court appearances, and parole hearings—enables prison-to-prison debates to be convened and archived with relative ease. In that many DOCs film and livestream their respective academic, vocational, and rehabilitative program graduation ceremonies, convening participants within a classroom, connecting the respective computers therein, and recording a prison-to-prison debate event using a fixed position webcam POV, requires nothing more than the use of the existing assets commonly situated in a prison classroom—a computer workstation webcam facing a fixed podium—and twelve participants (comprising three tiered teams of four), who take the podium in timed format intervals.

Differently-tiered teams debating different issues, effectively delivers three dynamic topical engagements, provides for the equitable inclusion of—and fair competition among—similarly experienced learners, facilitates active mentorship as competitors model for/imprint upon one another, allows judges/media to attend remotely in order to judge/report on the event without travel, and with an academic archival objective—not a commercial broadcast objective—prisons can avoid adverse media and broadcast the event internally to improve team performance. Resolved.

IPIPS Inside Knowledge | Re-Up Audiobook Project (RAP) is a non-commercial literacy-based performing arts modality using audio technology tools to creatively deconstruct, rearrange, and reproduce inspired renditions of previously published scholarly works of historical nonfiction, and present their meaning anew to reading-challenged free world and carceral state learners as interactive audio engagements that incorporate: author reflections; reviewer commentaries; resident-reader testimonials; poetic form treatments; and complimentary musical soundscapes wedded to culturally relevant vocal textures that process, frame, reimagine, and interpret the original work—remixing the original—produced by incarcerated college students in collaboration with the original work’s author, and interested academics aligned to confront the stubborn literacy and self-knowledge deficit.

The quantitative and qualitative efficacy of prison education programs generally, and higher education specifically, is a well-settled carceral studies understanding. Yet, in California’s prison system, where AA and BA degree programs are plentiful and free, 38% of the more than ninety thousand adults living in confinement are deemed functionally illiterate—owing to not having attained a high school diploma, or a GED—despite the fact that completing high school affords graduates and GED achievers a six-month sentence reduction. When incentivizing literacy-challenged students with six months of early freedom doesn’t work—it’s not working—and 52% still can’t read at the ninth grade level, despite the statewide prison population shrinking by nearly fifty thousands souls from a historical high of more than 140,000, we must question the methodology. It’s time to reimagine the use of literature and audio.

While we know that college success translates to desistance, we also know that non-readers don’t imprint upon academics—so, we need to be creative in thinking about how to engage non-readers in order to bridge them—from book apathy to book curiosity. It’s about devising effective prompts that motivate the desire to learn. Giving non-readers an accessible presentation of compelling nonfiction material conveyed by relatable voices that personalize and endorse the material, conveys the otherwise unread material by on-boarding it as an engaging audio experience that activates the elusive reading curiosity that translates to improved public safety when the desire to learn defeats apathy. It’s time to curate those pedagogically sound—but non-traditional—modalities that braid solid self-knowledge scholarship with innovative peer mentor engagement. Let’s Re-Up.

Unchained Voices Restorative Justice Festival at UCLA/Valley State Prison In 2024, the Ben Free Project convened a multidisciplinary multimedia symposium, conference, and concert event at the Ackerman Ballroom on the UCLA Campus sponsored by RAP Lab, VCJG, PEN America, CROP, SAR, ReEvolution, Radical Reversal, Barz Behind Bars, the COIN, and the Art of Recovery and Therapy (A.R.T.) community at Valley State Prison (VSP), featuring live performances and presentations by Radical Reversal, 3x Grammy-nominated recording artist Garren Edwards, 2x American Book Award-winning poet Dr. Randall Horton, Ph.D., former Director of PEN America’s Justice Writing Program Caits Meissner, and music producer Pofsky, as well as the inaugural inside-out Barz Behind Bars Poetry Contest, presenting the reading of winning poems selected from the more than 500 contest submissions crafted by confined creators throughout the country, and judged by the UCLA English department. Thank you to the many organizations, donors, artists, and UCLA student interns who selflessly activated to help center the creativity of those living in the margin and extend the Barz Behind Bars community’s creative arts mission via VSP’s A.R.T. into the community in collaboration with the most esteemed public university in America.

Advisory board

The nonprofit Ben Free Project’s Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild community of incarcerated newsmakers is advised by a diverse consortium of scholars, independent journalists, educators, and justice-impacted human rights activists committed to the democratization of speech, the universality of press freedoms, and the normalization of carceral state resident civic engagement.

Elizabeth Hinton

Elizabeth Hinton is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is the Co-Director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and the author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960’s (2021), and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016). As an instructor in the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) who serves on the YPEI Faculty Advisory Committee, she received the YPEI Faculty Award for the Most Impact on Students’ Education–an award voted on by the YPEI student body. While a member of the faculty at Harvard University in 2018, she produced an in-prison, in-person, outside-in British Parliamentary format collegiate debate at MCI-Norfolk between the Norfolk Prison Colony Debating Society and students from the Harvard College Debating Union. Her popular writings, book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals. Contact: @elizabethkai.bsky.social

You can find Elizabeth’s podcast with the Vanguard here.

Jonathon Simon

Jonathan Simon is the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Law & Society at UC Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (2014); Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007); and Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass (1993). His book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

Bruce Western

Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and the Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He previously served as the Director of the Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University and is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (2018); Punishment and Inequality in America (2006); and Between Class & Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (1999). His book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

Heather Ann Thompson

Heather Ann Thompson is the Frank W. Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising and Its Legacy (2016), and Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001). Her popular writings, book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). His latest collection, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, winner of the 2024 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, was released in June, 2023 (W.W. Norton & Co). Among his many academic appointments, he most recently served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Literature at The University of Michigan, before coming to Stanford University, where he currently holds the Humanities and Sciences Chair in English, and where he also serves as part of the inaugural faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies.

You can view a poem reading by him here.

Angel E. Sanchez

Angel E. Sanchez is a Ph.D. in Law candidate at Yale. Angel’s research explores the tensions between democracy, citizenship, and the U.S. criminal legal system. He focuses on how legal frameworks and institutions affect system-impacted individuals, particularly in areas such as voting rights restoration, access to higher education, and socio-economic inclusion. His work is deeply rooted in democratic values and seeks to advance interventions that protect the dignity and equal citizenship of individuals affected by the criminal legal system, especially those from marginalized communities.

Watch Angel’s message to the VCJG here.

Doran Larson

Doran Larson is the Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College and the founder of the American Prison Writing Archive at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison (2023), and the editor of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (2013). His popular writings, essays, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic journals.

Moira Marquis

Moira Marquis is co-founder and Director of both the Saxaphaw Prison Books Program and Prison Banned Books Week; co-editor of Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (University of Georgia Press); and lead author of the PEN America report on carceral censorship, “Reading Between the Bars.” Her popular writing can be found in Literary Hub, TIME magazine, The Progressive, The Hill, and Slate among others. Her academic writing can be found in Resilience, Green Letters, Science Fiction Studies, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature among others. She teaches at Fordham University.

Randall Horton

Randall Horton is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven and the co-founder of Radical Reversal, a carceral arts nonprofit funded by the Mellon Foundation. He is the co-editor of the American Library Association’s revised Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained, and the author of Dead Weight (2022), the 2021 American Book Award-winning work #280-128 (2020), the GLCA Creative Nonfiction New Writers Award-winning work Hook: A Memoir (2015), and The Definition of Place (2006). He is a member of the performance collective Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature, and his essays and commentaries appear in Salon, MSNBC, and a wide array of podcasts.

Joan Parkin

Joan Parkin is a Lecturer of English Language and Literature at Boston University’s Prison Education Program, the Director of the Vanguard Incarcerated Press, and co-founder and former Director of Feather River College’s Incarcerated Student Program, where she is a Professor Emerita. She is the author of Perspectives from the Cell House: An Anthology of Prisoner Writings, and was the coordinating advocate for members of the Death Row Ten, a group of tortured and wrongfully convicted death row prisoners in Chicago, Illinois, many of whom became pardoned by Governor George Ryan, which led to several subsequent death sentence commutations.

Nathanial Dahman

Nathaniel Dahman is a Lecturer of Music Technology at CSU Stanislaus and teaches Music History at Valley State Prison via Merced College’s Rising Scholars prison education program. Using his multi-discipline media composition expertise, he coordinates the collaborative community volunteer action work effort of CSU student cohorts who are aligned in delivering creative arts-based outside-in video and audio editing services to the Ben Free Project’s Inner Views video lecture series and audio podcast programming. In coordination with Radical Reversal, he is committed to curating and proctoring the nation’s first fully accredited audio podcast and radio sound design training program incubator that prepares confined content makers for the retail production demands of radio podcast programming and confers upon graduates thereof transferrable college credit.

Charlotte West

Charlotte West was a freelance journalist covering higher education issues for more than fifteen years before becoming the editor of College Inside in 2021 and focusing her national reporting on the intersection of the criminal justice and higher education systems. As the only national journalist covering higher education in prisons, she is a unique combination of publisher, editor, and collaborator who empowers stakeholders to craft their own copy, publishes their testimonies, and distributes that public-facing work back into the carceral state for residents to access digitally on-demand.

Marcus Henderson

Marcus Henderson is an award winning journalist and the former Editor in Chief for San Quentin News. He held that position for five years and helped train and develop other incarcerated journalists. He lead multiple forums with the incarcerated and law enforcement. He helped develop programs for youth offenders. His goal is to provide healing through words and art.

You can read his works here.

Kristine Guillaume

Kristine Guillaume is a PhD student in African American Studies and English at Yale University, and an instructor in the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI). Her research focuses Black prison print culture in the mid-to-late 20^th century. Prior to Yale, she completed master’s degrees in English and American Studies and in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Kristine graduated from Harvard University with a degree in History and Literature and African American Studies in 2020. She was a reporter at The Harvard Crimson before becoming the paper’s first Black woman president in 2019. Kristine has also published articles in The Atlantic, CBS, and Time Magazine.

Watch Kristine’s inspiring message to the VCJG here.

TaSin Sabir

TaSin Sabir is the Communications Manager for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the Editor in Chief of the All Of Us Or None newspaper, and has served as the contracted graphics designer for LSPC’s special projects, reports, marketing materials, and website development needs since 2016. An Oakland, California native, she graduated from California College of Arts and Crafts with a BFA degree in Fine Arts Photography, founded the OakPod community space, has exhibited her art nationally, and is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper and YO! Youth Outlook. Via her editor role at AOUON, she features the work of incarcerated writers and artists while collaborating with returning citizen staff journalists and community activists to center their lived experience and restore the civil rights of justice-impacted citizens.

Alissa M. Moore

Alissa Moore, after being sentenced to life in prison as a seventeen-year-old youth and surviving more than twenty-five years of confinement in both youth and adult prison systems, is a journalist for All Of Us Or None Newspaper, the NorCal Re-Entry Specialist for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the founder of Life Unlocked–a twenty-four-hours-a-day/seven-days-a-week crisis line for incarcerated persons–and policy consultant. Her commitment to the plight of people living in confinement and effectuating cost-effective no-nonsense public safety policy reform is reflected in her tireless organizing, activism, expert witness testimony on conditions of confinement, and her legislative advocacy, all of which have proven instrumental in the passage of several bills in California, most notably in the human healthcare space, involving SB 1139, SB 1254, and AB 1810.

To support this work, please consider aggregating the banners below via your social media. Thank you for standing for freedom.

Allies/Collaborators

Institute on Policing, Incarceration, & Public Safety (IPIPS) at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research ~ Harvard University

Journal of Prison Education Research ~ Virginia Commonwealth University | Incarcerated Writers Initiative (IWI) ~ Columbia University

American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) ~ Johns Hopkins University | Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture (RAP Lab) ~ UCLA

Poetry Center ~ University of Arizona | PEN America | Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) | BARD | Hudson Link

Merced College Rising Scholars ~ Alpha Gamma Sigma (AGS) | Coastline College ~ Hope Scholars

Underground Scholars | Project Rebound | All Of Us Or None Newspaper (AOUON)

College Inside | Exchange Magazine | Beyond Bars | Hope & Mic

Ben Free Project | Radical Reversal | Barz Behind Bars

Independent News Network (INN)